I have been in private practice for several years serving a wide array of client demographics and relationship constellations.  I serve folks of all gender identities, sexual preferences and relationships structures from more traditional dating, marriage and divorce to kink and poly. Since 2021, I have been training in clinical sexology with the Northwest Institute on Intimacy.

Prior to that, my career in social work started in 1995 providing case management to people with severe psychiatric disabilities. In 1998, I went on to attain my MSW, and in 2016 I graduated with a Doctorate in Social Welfare.  I have practiced across a wide array of settings, notably five years of research and training in perinatal and infant mental health and several years in psychosocial rehabilitation. I have also taught social work practice and other related content since 2009. I am currently an associate teaching professor on the faculty of the University of Washington School of Social Work. 

In my other life, over several decades, I have taught pleasure focused sex education and trained in sex and spirituality and somatic consent-based practices, most recently with The School of Consent.

Another key area of my research, teaching and practice revolves around the transformative power of the arts, particularly music and dance, in building community, healing trauma, transmitting culture and facilitating collective joy. To that end, I am a member of several collectives, including the Women Who Rock: Making Scenes, Building Community Project, which brings together musicians, media-makers, performers, artists, scholars and activists to explore the role of women, femmes and popular music in the creation of cultural scenes that anchor social justice movements in the Americas and beyond.

I am also a member of the Seattle Fandango Project community, which over the course of almost 15 years, has facilitatated the Afro-Mexican Fandango traditions of Veracruz, Mexico. Via teaching and sharing music, singing, and dancing, this now international musical movement is animated by the spirit of convivencia—or, in the words of Dr. Martha Gonzalez, intentionally convening community with an ethos of building collective care, joy and artivismo.

Most recently, I have been studying the dance and drum traditions of one of my ancestral lands, Southern Italy. Among which there are both traditions to cultivate collective joy as well as trance healing practices used to treat trauma that go back for centuries.

What does this mean for me as a therapist? It means that I hold culture, collective healing processes and many ways of knowing sacred. It also means that I take cultivating joy and a sense of belonging as seriously as I do treating problems. Lastly, music and dance demand an embodied awareness and have provided my most powerful educational experiences in working towards cultural humility and liberatory somatics.